


When the Sun Goes Down

by nowseahare



Category: Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator
Genre: F/M, M/M, Slow Burn, canon character death, canon cheating, friends to lovers to hot mess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 19:17:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16561721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowseahare/pseuds/nowseahare
Summary: A year later I'm still burning with the need to write the long messy canon backstory Roseph epic of my dreams. So here it is, it's my NaNo project now hahaRobert and Joseph's relationship from the very beginning. From unlikely friends bonding over their mistakes to... well. More mistakes. And then still more mistakes.





	When the Sun Goes Down

“Marilyn’s nickname is Mary, you know,” Robert said. He was holding a tiny styrofoam plate of untouched cantaloupe cubes and it had somewhere along the line turned into his ashtray, his pinched cigarette butts placed artfully around the rim. Like the rays of an unappetizing orange sun. 

“You don’t say?” Joseph offered, but he said it as if he was actually saying _“No shit?”_

Robert nodded. They both glanced at their wives across the yard, the two women equally slaying in the half-assed makeup of late summer evenings albeit in entirely different styles. Mary had her third or forth wine in hand and Marilyn was drinking iced tea in a way that probably wasn’t significant to anyone but Robert. The two Marys got on like old friends.

The two husbands… got on.

More or less.

Out of the corner of his eye, Robert shifted his attention back to Joseph.

Despite the effortlessly nonthreatening Peter O’Toole face and his affinity for just about everything that gave Robert spiritual hives, there was more to Joseph than met the eye. He was nice, yes, the sort of niceness that came from politeness and a no-doubt martyr-like sense of duty. But sometimes, every so often, he was also mean. Quietly, so nobody would notice. But Robert noticed. And Robert also noticed Joseph’s tattoos, and the secret wit behind his jokes, and how he seemingly held his own beside the gleeful fangs of Mary.

For Robert, who enjoyed reading people more than having friends, Joseph posed a tantalizing challenge.

However, he still hadn’t decided whether the man Joseph was hiding was interesting, or whether he’d already died under the weight of... whatever reason Joseph was hiding him for. Self-improvement. Being a good person. Robert’s impression of it was still too vague. Sometimes it even got under his skin a little, in the same itching way that Marilyn’s ever-progressing sobriety felt like a shot of comeuppance aimed right between his eyes.

“Life’s funny sometimes,” Joseph said, turning back to Robert, and Robert took the invitation to smoothly shift his side-eye into actual acknowledgment again. “ _My_ Mary is usually one of the guys, moreso than me. She butts heads with a lot of the women at church for some reason. It must be refreshing to find another gal on her wavelength.”

“No, _my_ Mary is actually a man,” Robert deadpanned, with fondness.

“Ah. That explains everything.”

They were in the Christiansens’ yard, of course, because Joseph seemed to hold a monopoly on neighborhood barbecues. The moment Robert and Marilyn moved in to Maple Bay, they received Joseph on their doorstep with a plate of alarmingly fresh cookies and a smile and the plans already in place for a barbecue in their honor. Robert spent more time in the Christiansen yard than his own yard.

The rest of the cul-de-sac was also mostly present, scattered across the lawn. Brian was expertly balancing the spent toothpicks of cocktail weenies between his fingers, talking to Mat animatedly like a sort of suburban dad Wolverine at the edge where the stone patio gave way to grass. You could track Craig Cahn’’s progress by the bobbing of his daughter above the crowd. He always seemed to have one kid or the other sitting on his shoulders. Robert genuinely liked these people, more or less. But he wasn’t one of them, nor a talkative partygoer.

Joseph had hunted him down mid-lurk. The corner of the yard where they were catching their rare conversation was one step from the shrubbery, almost clandestine.

“The school year’s starting up again soon,” Joseph said, stoking the smalltalk embers.

“Sure is,” said Robert.

“Did Mary tell you Christie and Christian are starting Kindergarten? I’m not ready.”

“Uh huh, right.” Robert gave him a little smirk. He suspected Joseph was plenty ready judging by the guilty relief in his voice.

Joseph had the grace to look chagrined. “I guess you have it worse though,” he added, “with Val going off to college and all.”

Robert’s smile immediately dropped. He just sorta grunted.

“She’ll be closer to New York again, right?”

“Yep.”

“Is she excited?”

“Ye-ep.”

Sensing a change of subject would be wise, Joseph returned to his own brood. “The twins aren’t excited at all. I guess they don’t want to leave home.”

“Take it as a compliment,” Robert said.

His attention was drawn down the street, where he could narrowly glimpse his own driveway through the trees. A smudge of purple car meant Val had just pulled in, as if summoned.

“Maybe your house is just nice and they’re comfortable,” Robert said distractedly. “You’re a good father.”

Joseph seemed completely at a loss for how to respond to that, which maybe should have been funny except Robert was already pulling away to go. Val’s imminent arrival was his sign to leave.

Joseph must have noticed the shift in posture, because all the sudden his friendliness amped up in a decidedly hopeful way.

“You know, Rob, Mary--my Mary--said you’re big into movies.”

Robert didn’t tell him not to call him Rob this time, mostly because he didn’t have a joke ready to refute it at the moment and he didn’t actually care.

“If by movies you mean _good_ movies, then yes,” he said instead.

“What about westerns?”

“Depends. I can never say no to Italians.” Robert sorta canted his hips back toward Joseph in tacit attention. Dropping one last conversation anchor, as it were.

Unexpectedly but delightfully, Joseph’s eyes lit up with genuine enthusiasm. “The local theatre has been running a series of midnight double features. A couple of old cheesy monster flicks like you’d expect, back to back for the price of one.”

“Sounds oldschool.”

“Right? The past couple weeks, though, it’s been actually good westerns instead.”

“Don’t tell me you’re saying claymation dinosaur movies aren’t actually good, Joseph.”

“All I’m saying is this Friday night is _A Fistful of Dollars_ followed directly by _For a Few Dollars More_.”

“Well damn,” said Robert. His smile pulled itself back from the grave, intrigued to life. Joseph had some party left in him after all.

“I need a co-conspirator and Mary hates those things,” Joseph said. “My treat?”

“Consider it a date, tiger.”

Joseph raised his Solo cup margarita in a mock toast.

Moments later, Robert’s cantaloupe cubes and cigarette butts made a wet noise sloughing into the trash bin under the food table.

As he left through the side-lawn, he instinctively turned down the sidewalk in the direction that would take him farthest from his own house. It was the long way round the cul-de-sac, just so he could avoid passing his own front door. It was almost second nature to him now. The longer he went without seeing Val, the harder it was to face her.

He watched his worn-out old boots scuff along the concrete, and remembered hurtling over the handlebars of his bike so many years ago back in Brooklyn. How he cracked open his chin and gouged out the scar that still lived on his chest. How Val, just a kid then, instinctively laughed before she panicked, and how through his jangled up brains he kinda loved her for that.

The shame hit him all at once, and he abruptly turned around to man up and go the other way.  He’d take the same sidewalk Val would be walking down, so they could meet each other going opposite directions on her trek to the Christiansens’. He could ask how the last couple days at her friend’s house went, or whatever. She was spending more and more time at friends’ houses lately. It was weird because she hadn’t had much time to make new friends here yet, the move still fresh, but Robert wouldn’t pry because he didn’t have the right to.

In the end, he passed one house and then another and finally his own without any sign of Val approaching after all. Either she was already at the barbecue through the backyards or she’d decided to stay home.

It was for the best, probably.

He readjusted the edges of his jacket and stuffed his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunching against the budding summer night. Soon the last fireflies and the light-polluted inkling of Orion’s belt would be hazily drifting overhead. He wouldn’t see any of it, because he was headed straight for Jim and Kim’s for the foreseeable future. A bottle of whiskey was there with his name on it, along with Neil’s knowing but nonjudgmental silence.

Robert missed the city. Suburbia lacked realism. Or maybe it lacked something more like... Robertism. After all, everybody else seemed damn fine with Maple Bay’s easy peace.

He was the drunk sore thumb and all that.

 

* * *

  

Friday night Marilyn and Val were going out for a girl’s night. Robert hadn’t been invited partly because Marilyn assumed he’d be elsewhere. He did, after all, make a habit of being elsewhere. 

The other part was that he tended to carry around this haze of tension with him whenever he was home, and it frankly wasn't fun to have around. He could almost physically see the defenses go up around his girls like forcefields when he walked in, the quiet toughness on their faces. He could picture them reeling in those emotions that still instinctively drifted toward him, because they had learned by now that their love would only meet a painful empty space there, a goddamn mess of a man. His own love was too clumsy, and it was easier to bottle up because if he let himself feel it too much everything became unbearable. The Smalls existed in a deadlock of stoicism.

“We’re seeing a show at the rep theatre,” Marilyn explained, putting in her earrings using the mirror over the hall counter. The decorating in the Small household was eclectic to say the least. It was nothing compared to their old place in Brooklyn, but the walls were still crowded with the random paraphernalia of an imaginative if not entirely functional family. Marilyn’s face in the mirror was bordered by an authentic boomerang on one side and a not-at-all-authentic dreamcatcher on the other.

“That’s great,” Robert said.

“We’ll be home around 11.”

She didn’t ask what he’d be up to. Even mentioning their expected curfew seemed like an afterthought, like it wasn’t really his business to know.

“I’ll be out late too,” he said, more because of the natural segue than anything. “I’m seeing a movie with Joseph.”

“Mary’s Joseph?” Marilyn had the good sense to laugh a little.

“Yeah, I know. We’ll see how that goes.”

She didn’t tell him to have fun or to go easy on the drinks this time. She did, however, lay a hand on his shoulder when she turned around, just her fingertips dancing over the fabric of his shirt before they were gone again. It was an absent gesture, like she was simply using him to steady herself, but she also gave him a strained sort of smile.

Then she shouldered past to see how Val was getting on. His throat all at once felt parched for a cigarette

 

* * *

 

Robert waited at the street corner outside the cinema until Joseph arrived in khaki pants and a thankfully non-pastel button-up. It was a dark blue-gray actually, kinda like his eyes.

“You showed up just in time,” Robert said, flicking his cigarette butt into the alley. “I coulda been mugged by a boyscout.” 

“I didn’t expect you to be the type to arrive early,” Joseph said. Ah, there it was. The innocent cherub expression but the secret meanness Robert liked.

Robert was in his omnipresent jacket of course, and weirdly Joseph reached for the lapel.

“... Can I help you?” said Robert, at the same time that Joseph extracted a piece of leaf.

“... Been trudging through the woods…?” Joseph asked.

“Not everybody has a boat.”

“A nature-lover, then.”

“Damn straight.”

Joseph inexplicably beamed and they went to get tickets. In the light of the kiosk, Robert could better see that Joseph’s hair was actually slicked back, maybe just with his fingers and water. It was a new look. Not half bad.

“They actually have really good cocktails at the bar,” Joseph said, leading the way inside.

“They allow drinks?” Thank Christ.

“Local perks, right?”

It was an old building, with a bronzy gilding up in the eaves and faded red satin between the leafy beams of the ceiling. It had the sad splendor of a place that was once amazing but had outlived itself, kind of the same vibe as a 50-cent flea market heirloom.

Robert loved it wholeheartedly. He could tell by the selection of framed posters in the entry hall that the people who kept this relic alive really fucking loved movies.

“Let’s get hammered,” Robert said.

“Wha?”

“I’m kidding, Joseph.”

“Oh.”

He shot Joseph a raised eyebrow. “Or am I?”

Robert was going to get mildly hammered.

At the dimly lit bar in the corner of the lobby, Joseph ordered, of all damn things, a piña colada. Robert ordered a beer pitcher. A refillable beer pitcher. A calculated sacrifice in alcohol proof for the sake of quantity. This was not Robert’s first rodeo.

When Joseph got his drink, he moved aside the cherry and pineapple slice stabbed together with a little plastic sword, and pinched his lips over the straw. He gave Robert a sort of baleful side-glance, lacking judgment but perhaps hoping a little that Robert would understand the effort that non-judgment required in this situation.

They found their theater and were just about the only ones there, so of course they sat in the very middle.

The seats were cramped, maybe even moreso than your average movie theater seat, but there were convenient little trays between them where Robert could balance the beer pitcher and two cups beside Joseph’s tropical booze slushie comfortably. Even before the lights dimmed for the film, it was fairly dark. It made the planes of Joseph’s face stand out weirdly. He had a lumpy face, but the sort of lumpy that was handsome, like Hollywood’s golden age. His sleeves were rolled up, and his forearms perched on his armrest gingerly. Sitting right next to him, Robert could spy the dusting of almost-imperceptible blonde hair on his arms, as well as the blue curve of the bottom of his anchor tattoo, peeking out on the comfortable heft of a bicep before disappearing up his sleeve.

Joseph was actually the first to put his feet up on the seat in front of him.

“Good man,” Robert said appreciatively, and started pouring the beer.

The room darkened, and the screen glowed, dust motes circling in the beam of the projector overhead. Imagine here the title screen for _A Fistfull of Dollars_ , in its red and black silhouettes and baleful cowboy whistling. Now imagine, in the exact same Spaghetti Western font, a time card reading Many Drinks Later: Robert Small Awakened. He left once in the middle of the damn movie for a refill of the pitcher. He and Joseph started sharing after the piña colada was gone, and they were making good time. The first movie wasn’t even over yet and Robert’s face was nicely beer-warm.

Robert never felt truly awake unless he was a little buzzed. Maybe he’d broken his brain and this was the only way to be his real self anymore.

Anyway, the night was immediately more fun.

“Clint Eastwood was hot,” Robert commented.

In the dark, Joseph’s big ol’ eyebrows rose in a decidedly Christian way but the rest of his face was downright thrilled.

“Did he ever stop being hot?” Joseph asked.

“His politics are kinda terrible.”

“Hmm yes… That does put a damper on things.”

“Pours some cold water in your lap.”

“But what about The Man With No Name? As a fictional cowboy, he has the advantage of looking like Clint Eastwood without being Clint Eastwood.”

“Fuck it, you're right! What a fox.”

“Fiction is truly a miracle,” Joseph said solemnly.

Robert leaned heavily on his armrest in Joseph’s direction, careful to avoid knocking over anything on the tray between them.

“You’re not as wholesome as you appear,” he said. Not even an accusation, really, just a fact.

“Neither are you,” Joseph deadpanned. But it didn’t work. He made a spluttering sort of snort-giggle noise and reached for his most recent beer to try and recover.

The light of the hot desert sun in the film illuminated his face, his teeth, before flashing back to shadow and conspiracy.

Robert was having fun.

“Do you think we could get onto the roof of this building?” he asked.

“Excuse me, what?” said Joseph.

All at once, Robert stood. The first movie was at its climax, but they hadn’t been watching it for awhile now anyway. He lifted the pitcher solemnly with two hands, like Indiana Jones lifting a golden idol off a pedestal.

“Are you with me or against me?” he asked.

Joseph just looked at him, beer cup still frozen halfway to his mouth.

“... You’re serious. The roof.”

“I’m always serious. It’s deadly how serious I get.”

Joseph looked exactly like a stressed Muppet for a few seconds but then he finally said “Alright. Alight.”

And he stood, a little wobblingly, and followed Robert’s lead.

Robert, because he was a genius, took the opportunity to refill their only half-empty pitcher yet again. They would have to piss for 900 years after this.

Then they slunk back into the red satin bowels of the theater’s hallways, in search of adventure. Joseph finished his most recent cup of beer as they skulked, holding Robert’s cup as well in automatic politeness.

“There’s always a back door,” Robert said.

There was indeed a back door. It opened onto the same alley Robert had graced with his cigarette earlier. It didn’t sound an alarm when they opened the door--always a plus--and they exited into the night in view of another excellent discovery.

“I knew it,” Robert said, gazing up at the rickety fire escape climbing the cinema’s faded brick wall. “These old theaters used to have apartments upstairs. Looks like our roof is perfectly accessible.”

“Perfectly,” Joseph repeated, halfway between meek and steeling himself. He was game, that was the surprising part. He was trying so hard to be game. “Isn’t the bottom ladder a little high?”

Robert gestured grandly to the closed lid of a dumpster.

“Use your resources, Joseph.”

They were both pushing a little old to be using their resources in quite this fashion. They scampered and scrambled more than they climbed, and if there had been any witnesses they surely would not have been impressed. But the two middle-aged men did, in fact, get to the fire escape, and did in fact climb it to the roof, with a pitcher of beer and two cups precariously in tow. There was a little pigeon alcove up there and everything.

Robert sat cross-legged on the roof, under the warm summer darkness and the stars ballsy enough to find their way through the clouds. The moon was half full, and Venus and Mars shone bright, like twin beauty marks on the same face.

Joseph sat very close to him, mostly on accident. Their knees bumped. They were breathlessly chuckling at each other because, well, what they’d just done was ridiculous but they’d done it, and that was worth bragging about, really.

They sat the pitcher in front of them, refilled their glasses, and actually clinked their drinks together. Cheers. To The Man With No Name.

It wasn’t long before Robert was hot into an alcohol-fueled monologue on the masculine circle-jerk tendencies of cowboy movie fans.

“The good films are actually about the deep neurotic loneliness of the lone wolf trope,” he said. “Goes right over their heads, of course.”

“Don’t you kind of like it though?” Joseph asked, grinning and looking rather rosy-cheeked himself.

“Like what?”

“The fantasy in these films. That idea of being your own man, off in this beautiful wilderness. You own yourself but not the… rocks.”

“The rocks, Joseph?”

“You know what I mean. You don’t own the land. The rocks, those big expanses of golden dirt, the brush, the sky. It’s never yours. But you own yourself. Isn’t that the perfect sort of adventure?” Joseph waved a hand, cycling it at the wrist vaguely. “Owning nothing but yourself, that’s the ideal of a person.”

“That sounds awfully Buddhist for a Christian.”

“Well, I like reading about a lot of different spiritualities. But that’s not what I mean here, I’m not talking about religion.”

“You’re just talking about being.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

A smile slid lopsidedly across Robert’s face. “I can get behind that.”

Joseph watched him strangely intently, with a sort of warmth that shivered down into Robert’s guts. Something in their proximity, their tailbones already smarting upon the hard rooftop, their shoulders curved toward each other unconsciously as they spoke… Something about it all felt nicely secret. Like a confession. Or maybe something a lot easier than that.  It was a stupidly sentimental reaction for Robert to have, to the simple impression of someone liking you.

Or maybe it wasn’t so stupid, because a moment later Joseph leaned over and placed a kiss squarely on Robert’s mouth.

It seemed to happen in slow motion almost. Like Robert was watching it happen the whole time and could have stopped it at any point, during one of the slowed down frames of the animation. But he didn’t. And then Joseph’s lips were on his, very soft. The sourness of his beer breath was on Robert’s face, and surely Robert was returning that favor.

It all went straight to Robert’s head and kinda spun in circles there, but Joseph didn’t pursue anything further. He just pulled back, sat up straight, and stared at Robert with big, expectant eyes, like a blue-eyed deer in his headlights.

Fuck.

Robert’s poker face must have fallen without him knowing it, because Joseph’s expression quickly went dark and closed.

_Fuck_.

“I’m married,” Robert said slowly.

He didn’t point out that Joseph was also married because Joseph already knew that and clearly Joseph’s own marriage wasn’t much of a deterrent at the moment.

There was a second--a long second--when Robert’s chest squirmed, and the ugliness that lived in there whispered about how long it had been since he and Marilyn had even slept in the same room, let alone slept _together_. They barely even knew each other any more.

Robert loved her in the sense that he had loved her for twenty years and he wasn’t sure what not loving her would even feel like, whether it was happening right now or had already happened or whether it was even possible to love somebody you barely knew any more. That factor was ambiguous.

But he wanted to swallow that _ugliness_ , that monster inside him, because it clawed up in his lungs and made him burn every time. He hated it aggressively, urgently. He hated how it had ruined everything, how it had made his daughter grow up so much more between each time he saw her. He hated it even when it wasn’t awake because he knew it was still in there waiting for him.

So he threw back the rest of his drink and clunked it down on the roof in front of him, heavy and final.

“I can’t do that to Marilyn,” he said. That was the truest part.

Whether they were still in love or not, he knew he couldn’t do it.

Joseph’s face crumbled, as if he’d realized all at once he was the opposite. He _could_ do this to Mary. As he raised a hand to press to his forehead, shielding half of that wretched expression, it felt like Robert was suddenly looking at something deeply private, so he glanced away.

The two men sat in silence.

Then, finally, Joseph let out a sound like a laugh and dragged his hand back to the drink in his lap, as if to coddle it. As if to wrap himself around it fetally.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, sounding like he really goddamn meant it.

“It’s fine,” Robert muttered. It wasn’t but, well, fuck it. It was about as fine as either of them were bound to get. “I won’t talk about it if you won’t.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s fine.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Joseph, it’s fine.”

If Robert could bully it into being fine through pure hardheadedness, he was going to.

They sank back into uneasy silence again. The night buzzed with the silence. All at once, Robert missed the white noise of having a film in front of them. And in the same moment, it occurred to him finally that the Christiansen family wasn’t nearly as perfect as it looked.

Hadn’t that been what he liked about Joseph Christiansen?

It felt darker now, like maybe Robert’s armchair psychology hobby shouldn’t have been rewarded in such a painful and real way.

And yet…

Wasn’t there also a sort of camaraderie to it?

Joseph Christiansen and Robert Small. The two fuckups of Maple Bay.

He swallowed that idea, because it was another selfish joke. But he would remember it. He disliked himself for it, but he would.

“Remember when I said you were a good father, Joseph?” he said finally.

Joseph’s shoulders went very still and very solid, bracing for a hit.

“Far as I know, that hasn’t changed yet,” Robert muttered. “I don’t know how many people you’ve approached like this--”

“Just you,” said Joseph.

That was almost a compliment. “What I’m saying is. I think you have the opportunity here to keep your family together, to keep your kids happy.” _You’re not as far gone as me yet._ “I’m saying this honestly, ok? You… you can keep things, you just have to fix it. Or whatever.”

Robert’s speech died into a mutter and a sort of glower at his own hands because talks about feelings really weren’t his forte, not remotely. But trust Robert Small to skip the small talk. To get right to the point that needs to be made.

Joseph exhaled in a weirdly audible way, like a sigh but slower, shakier.

“Thank you, Robert,” he said softly, and when Robert looked up Joseph was smiling, just a little. In a way that was a lot more real than usual, and also a lot more painful. “You’re a good friend.”

A friend, huh? Well. Robert had fallen right into that one without realizing it.

“We can be friends,” Robert said. When had he started meaning that?

“Let’s.”

Comrades.

“There’s something else,” Robert said.

Joseph looked up through the one curl of hair that had dislodged from its tidiness to hang over his forehead. He looked like a parody of Superman. “What’s that?” he asked.

“I’m considerably drunker now. How the fuck are we getting down from here?”

Joseph’s initial face was just slack with surprise but then he threw his head back and laughed, loud enough to wheeze, like his lungs weren’t quite built for this much open expression.

“No but really,” Robert deadpanned.

It wouldn’t be ok. But neither of them _were_ quite ok, so maybe it could just be… them. For now. Their version of ok. While Maple Bay continued sleeping, getting ready to wake up again to its suburban perfection tomorrow. This town made it look so easy.


End file.
